what’s in a name?

The founding editors and much of the staff reside in Cincinnati, also known as the “Queen City,” a moniker that stuck beginning in the early 1820s when the city experienced incredible growth. We pair this with the image in the upper left corner: a shot of the city’s much mythologized abandoned subway tunnel that was built in the early 1920s. Much as a two-mile portion of the tunnel continues to be maintained, Cincinnati continues to be called the Queen City, whether to evoke a sense of history or its loss, nostalgia or irony, hope or disappointment. We see this local curiosity as an appropriate jumping off point for this journal, which, among other things, welcomes explorations of contradictory terms and meanings and their shifting rhetorical contexts.